Promoting the rottweiler

John Reid was tailor made to be a front man for Tony Blair. A man of certitudes: he had absolute certitude as a communist; as a militant trade union functionary; as an aide to Neil Kinnock when he was still remotely socialist. John Reid now has absolute certitude in the rectitude of New Labour.

He always viewed disagreement with his prevailing certitude as treachery or a violation of the Holy Grail. If Mr Blair was under fire in Scotland Mr Reid in his previous job was sent on television to do battle and put the nation straight. No matter how absurd the brief he never blushed but instead looked intently into the camera and delivered the message - with absolute certitude.

As predicted - and no doubt for these services rendered to Number 10 - he is now deemed worthy of higher office as Peter Mandelson's replacement. Furthermore, in the Times earlier this year, we had already been told that Mr Reid was to be one of the select few who will spearhead New Labour's election campaign.

Mr Reid's credentials for such elevation have to be questioned. And any questioning should include scrutiny of the evidence submitted to MPs on the standards committee by Elizabeth Filkin, the parliamentary commissioner. In essence this is concerned with allegations that Mr Reid misused parliamentary funds for party political/electoral purposes.

The evidence and findings were published on December 22, a time when parliament was closing shop for some weeks - a time of office parties, a void time for matters political. The timing was deliberate. Through the week New Labour spin doctors had been at work telling their trusted hacks that Mr Reid would be cleared. This duly appeared in the Scottish press. When the voluminous details were made public, the office parties were in full swing. Hopefully, from the government's point of view, the grisly facts would therefore be sunk without trace. I am fed up with New Labour's manipulation of a too compliant media. It was between Christmas and New Year, highly valued time in the Jimmy Reid calendar, that I took time to scrutinise all the documents. It was not an uplifting experience.

Members of the select committee had split along party lines. The majority are Labour. The verdict was comparable, in a partisan context, to that of the US supreme court's ruling on the counting of votes in the state of Florida.

If the verdict had been guilty, Mr Reid would have had to resign and all hell would have been let loose in the run up to the election: for New Labour this was something to be devoutly avoided. The select committee of MPs ruled the allegations not proven.

But Mrs Filkin had found that there was an arrangement, agreed by Labour party officials and sufficiently formal to have been incorporated within budget assumptions, whereby parliamentary office funds were used to supplement the party salaries of three researchers.

Mrs Filkin concluded that as their employers, John Reid and John Maxton MP must at the very least have been aware of the arrangement, if not involved in its instigation. She also had regard to the evidence of Mr Rowley and Mr Rafferty, senior officials with responsibility for the deployment of campaign staff. Their evidence, in her view, was corroborated by the evidence of Paul McKinney, formerly Labour's director of communications in Scotland, and Willie Sullivan, formerly Scottish development officer at SLP headquarters.

Messrs Reid and Maxton rubbished these witnesses as untrustworthy and driven by a grudge because of the circumstances in which they left the Labour party. If they were all untrustworthy, what does this tell us of New Labour, who appointed them to all these key positions? Or did they become "untrustworthy" only when they disagreed with Mr Reid?

But for me the real clincher was the transcript of the telephone conversation between John Reid and Alex Rowley, former general secretary of the Scottish Labour party, which ended:

AR: It also says in [Filkin's] letter "I shall ask if you prefer to give evidence to me under oath."

JR: Yeah, well, you can say "no".

Words I think have meanings in addition to their literal meaning. The language employed throughout the transcript has disturbing tones. There is menace abroad. Alex Rowley was told that if he didn't play ball he would never work again in the Scottish Labour movement. He didn't. He has now left Scotland to take up employment elsewhere.

It's not without significance that John Reid is widely referred to in Scotland as "the rottweiler".

 Jimmy Reid and John Reid were both formerly in the Communist party in Scotland.